Despite the rants (and the campaign by factory farming groups) that it has nothing to do with pigs, there is at least reasonable evidence that it does have to do with pigs. So Swine Flue it is.

A comment to this effect from Michael Pollan: “Last year, eighteen months ago, the Pew Commission on animal agriculture released a report calling attention to the public health risks of the way we’re raising pork and other meat in this country. And they actually predicted in that report—they said the way you’re raising pigs in America today creates a perfect environment for the generation of new flu pandemics, basically because once you get that mutation, which sooner or later is about to happen, it very quickly—you have … so much genetic material coming together, so concentrated, and then so many pigs can catch it, and … we’ve created these Petri dishes for new diseases. And here we go.” (courtesy of alternet

A New York Times article discusses how corporations are trying to cash in on the growing American interest in eating locally grown foods by claiming everything they sell is local: Lays potato chips are a local Florida food, for example, because they buy some of their potatoes from a Florida farm.

“We are interested in quality and quickness because we want consumers to get the freshest product possible, but we have a fairly significant sustainability program, and local is part of that,” Aurora Gonzalez, director of public relations for Frito-Lay North America, which is owned by PepsiCo. “We want to do business more efficiently, but do it in a more environmentally conscious way.”

Sorry, I don’t think being conscious of the economic benefits of claiming to be environmental and local is quite the same thing.

In his column this weekend, pundit George Will seizes on Darwin’s birthday as grounds to take shots at the Endangered Species Act: More than a century after Darwin proved the power of natural selection, here government is doing stuff that challenges it.
Of course, the example he cites—the act blocking a dam that threatened to wipe out an endangered species of fish—is hardly a case of natural selection in action.
And as a guy who wears glasses should know, much of human accomplishment consists of defying the laws of nature: We prolong our lives with medicine, enable infertile couples to have babies (certainly another example of cheating natural selection) and have turned corn from a scraggly, undersized natural creature to the big-kerneled plant it is today (check out Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma for details of corn’s relationship with us).
So apparently it’s only when environmentalists question nature that Will feels devoted to it.

An article in the New York Times discusses how farming, particularly raising livestock, may contribute to global warming, particularly now that India and China’s meat consumption is booming.